Firefox fights back, holds on to second place in world browser share

Chrome stays third, nearly a point behind the Mozilla browser.

Last month, it looked like Firefox's relinquishing of the second place browser spot was inevitable. In May, Mozilla's browser market share had dropped below 20 percent. It was just 0.14 points ahead of Google's Chrome.

But Firefox has somehow fought back. Chrome's share is down, Firefox's is up, and there's almost a point separating the two.

The last couple of months have seen only slight declines for Internet Explorer. Microsoft's browser is still losing share, but at a much slower rate than we saw a year ago. This suggests the steady half a point per month erosion of its share may be at an end.

Firefox's gains and Chrome's losses are both a little surprising. Chrome suffered setbacks earlier in the year after Google penalized itself for improper advertising and promotion, but it looked like the company had resumed its trend of steady gains.

Counting browser market share remains difficult. The information source we use, Net Marketshare, strives to assess the proportion of Web users using each browser. To do this, it uses demographic data from the CIA World Factbook to provide national weightings that it applies to the raw counts it collects. Other sources, such as the widely quoted StatCounter, only denote the relative number of webpages viewed in each browser. That site explicitly eschews such weighting techniques. The main result of this is that Net Marketshare places greater importance on Internet Explorer-dominated markets such as China while StatCounter, in contrast, places much more weight on North American usage patterns. Accordingly, that metric gives Chrome a slight edge over Internet Explorer, at 32.76 percent to 32.31 percent.

Further confounding matters, Google announced at its I/O conference last week that it had 310 million Chrome users, and that there were 2.3 billion Internet users in total. Assuming that most of these Internet users use the Web at least occasionally, this gives Chrome a share of just 13.4 percent of the Internet-using public.

Chrome retains the distinction of being the only browser with an effective update system. While a few Chrome users do stick with older versions of the browser for one reason or another, they make up only 9.5 percent of Chrome's userbase. The vast majority of Chrome users are either on the current stable build or a beta of an upcoming version.

Firefox, in contrast, has left a lot of users behind. Even optimistically assuming that every user of Firefox 10 is on the (secure, patched) Extended Support Release version (rather than the insecure, unpatched mainline version), a quarter of Firefox users are behind the times, using flawed, exploitable software.

The situation for Internet Explorer is harder to gauge. First the good news; Internet Explorer 9 is continuing to make large gains. That is up almost a full point from May. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 continue to drop. Less encouraging is that Internet Explorer 8 is still the most widely used browser in the world, with just over one in four Internet users picking it for their browsing.

What we can't tell so easily is whether these users are patched and up to date. Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, and 9 are all supported long-term and will all receive security patches until at least 2014 (for Internet Explorer 6) and as long as 2020 (for Internet Explorer 9). So potentially, all Internet Explorer users of these versions could be protected against most known flaws.

Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 will always show this information, regardless of installed patches.

That's not likely, however. Many of those users could be using flawed, unpatched versions. We just can't easily tell. Microsoft doesn't change the version number whenever it fixes security flaws in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8. Internet Explorer 9 does have an "update version"—currently 9.0.7—but this isn't reported as part of the User Agent that is widely used to identify browser versions.

Internet Explorer 9 adds the "9.0.7" version to show the patch level—but that's still not included in the User Agent.

As such, the patch situation for Internet Explorer may be even worse than that of Firefox.

Chrome remains thoroughly dominant here at Ars, further increasing its lead over everything else.

Whoo, go Firefox! Now if only those jerks who insist on staying in 3.6.x would upgrade already.

And it's actually good to see IE9 gaining some share from the rest of the other IE versions. I know IE is quite hated among the "technical" but I'd rather IE users be browsing the web with a sandboxed, process isolated and GPU HWA semi-modern browser that has the bonus of having (very limited) HTML5 compatibility. Anything to make it that much easier on the Web Devs.

If only Firefox for Mac would adapt new OS X features faster. I assume that Firefox's share on OS X is constantly declining, right?

Keychain support? -> still none, Firefox had years to work on thisAuto hide scrollbars (Lion)? -> still none, Firefox had about a year to work on thisNative full screen (Lion)? -> still none, Firefox had about a year to work on this

Also, the scrolling has bugs such as tearing and other glitches.

It's really said, as I think that Firefox has a lot of potential but it seems that the developers/designers don't care about a good OSX implementation of their browser.

Still a big Firefox proponent, even on OSX. Even after my credit card info was stolen after donating to them. Few years ago. The simple fact is I love the extensions, I have multiple devices using a single FF profile, and I like Mozillas relative independence.

I don't trust for a second that google isn't mining information from Chrome. Just don't trust them. But it is fast, I will give them that.

If find it somewhat depressing to see FF losing out to Chrome. Aside from Chrome being a joke of a browser, my main issue is that Chrome is based on WebKit. Google piggybacking on Apple's technology hurts innovation. Most Chrome users are unaware they are using Safari, just with less options.

FireFox is a full-featured browser, which Safari and Chrome are not. As no frills as Safari seemed, Google really took the cake with Chrome. It would be quite interesting if Apple built a new web engine, and abandoned WebKit. Chrome "innovation" would die instantly, as without Apple, WebKit is nothing.

But, most people are dumb. They go to Google, they see an ad for Chrome, they download it and are amazed at how much faster it is than IE. Meanwhile, the innovative bunch building the best browser (FF) are left out.

Of course I'd rather people be using a WebKit browser than IE, but I am tired of Apple having to be the software and hardware innovator for the world. It would be nice if other companies could innovate, and Mozilla is a group doing that.

It's odd that Android devices greatly outnumber iDevices, and yet mobile Safari absolutely crushes Android (even if you assume all Opera Mini users are on Android, which definitely isn't true). It seems like a huge percentage of Android users are using their phones no differently than they used feature phones in the years before (i.e. shunned the POS "browser" they had, that was really just there to bill you at an absurd rate).

It's really said, as I think that Firefox has a lot of potential but it seems that the developers/designers don't care about a good OSX implementation of their browser.

Chrome on the other hand adapts new API in OSX vey fast.

That said, if you want the absolute best Mac OS browsing experience (especially on a multitouch trackpad), gotta use Safari. If nothing else, the swiping to the left and right with 2 fingers to go backwards and forwards in history is awesome. Lastpass on Safari is also well integrated. But this is a given from Apple, others prefer non-Apple solutions...

I'm left wondering why there are so many conflicting results from different sources over the browser market. Some reports are saying that Chrome has surpassed not only Firefox, but Internet Explorer as well. I'm curious as to how this data is measured, and whether or not it's an accurate sampling of the truth.

I think that you are showing more significant figures than are justified by the methodology. An error is introduced by the initial sampling, and a larger error is introduced by the per-country sampling. I would believe figures rounded to a percent, but these hundredths of a percent are questionable.

If find it somewhat depressing to see FF losing out to Chrome. Aside from Chrome being a joke of a browser, my main issue is that Chrome is based on WebKit. Google piggybacking on Apple's technology hurts innovation. Most Chrome users are unaware they are using Safari, just with less options.

FireFox is a full-featured browser, which Safari and Chrome are not. As no frills as Safari seemed, Google really took the cake with Chrome. It would be quite interesting if Apple built a new web engine, and abandoned WebKit. Chrome "innovation" would die instantly, as without Apple, WebKit is nothing.

But, most people are dumb. They go to Google, they see an ad for Chrome, they download it and are amazed at how much faster it is than IE. Meanwhile, the innovative bunch building the best browser (FF) are left out.

Of course I'd rather people be using a WebKit browser than IE, but I am tired of Apple having to be the software and hardware innovator for the world. It would be nice if other companies could innovate, and Mozilla is a group doing that.

It used to be that the browser was an application and webpages were static content. Back then I used Opera which was the most innovative browser. But at some point it became that the webpages were the apps, the browser was just a viewer and it made sense for the brower to recede from view. Chrome kickstarted that process. Features just don't matter anymore. Firefox extension developers may be innovative but Mozilla itself? Absolutely not. Their complete, and late mind you, jump onto the chrome look, feel and update system bandwagon illustrates that.

If find it somewhat depressing to see FF losing out to Chrome. Aside from Chrome being a joke of a browser, my main issue is that Chrome is based on WebKit. Google piggybacking on Apple's technology hurts innovation. Most Chrome users are unaware they are using Safari, just with less options.

Since you apparently aren't aware, Apple didn't originally create WebKit. Several years ago, they forked KDE's KHTML rendering engine, abstracted out the Qt-specific backend, and released it publicly under the name of 'WebKit' (there's a huge number of backends available for WebKit now, including QtWebKit). Many independent organizations contribute huge amounts of code to the project, including both Apple and Google.

The entire point of the WebKit project was to have a common rendering engine that multiple projects could leverage. Mozilla at many times have made the same claim that Gecko was supposed to do that, but time and again Mozilla has failed to be able to maintain anything resembling a stable API (to say nothing of a stable ABI!). That's a large part of why many of the projects that had been trying to embed Gecko abandoned it for WebKit (I came to the same conclusion as all those projects when I looked at the two a few years back). WebKit has long since succeeded where Gecko failed miserably.

Or was your entire post meant as a joke, pointing out how Firefox was simply the Mozilla Suite with 'less options'?

Even if Firefox wasn't already my favorite browser, I could still think of one awesome reason to use it: it's not Webkit.

Don't get me wrong, Webkit is a great rendering engine. There's nothing wrong with it. But I firmly believe the public needs more than one feasible option for viewing the web, because otherwise it becomes too easy for web developers to just be lazy and write pages directed at just the one engine. Anybody remembers the days of "Best viewed in Netscape"?

Don't even bother mentioning Trident as an option. And I don't care how unreasonable that is, so don't bother mentioning that either.

.. Aside from Chrome being a joke of a browser, my main issue is that Chrome is based on WebKit. Google piggybacking on Apple's technology hurts innovation. Most Chrome users are unaware they are using Safari, just with less options.

You do realize that Apple piggybacked WebKet from KHTML which was written for KDE on Linux. That is why it is open source in the first place. Because it HAD to be.

I don't trust for a second that google isn't mining information from Chrome. Just don't trust them. But it is fast, I will give them that.

Hope to see FF keep making gains.

You do realize that Google is mining for data regardless of the browser you're using and regardless of wether you're logged into your Google account, don't you? And so are the "news" websites that raise that paywall in your face. You pay for a subscription and with your personal data when you read those Time and WSJ articles.

InterfaceX wrote:

If find it somewhat depressing to see FF losing out to Chrome. Aside from Chrome being a joke of a browser, my main issue is that Chrome is based on WebKit. Google piggybacking on Apple's technology hurts innovation. Most Chrome users are unaware they are using Safari, just with less options.

Aside from Kitsune's point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Origins read about Apple requiring the signing of NDAs to look at the source code of the fork of an LGPL project) , you should know that Apple sometimes lags two years or more to integrate security patches from the Webkit project, patches that Google often commits. Google, and any contributor to Webkit could just fork the project and not give back because it is licensed (except for the GPLed JavaScriptCore & WebCore) under BSD.

Yup. I browse maybe 3 pages per week on my Nexus phone. No need - I have a dual-monitor setup at work and home. I do spend some time browsing via mobile apps (like engadget, woot) if I have a spare minutes in a meeting... but rarely use the web browser.

However, many friends I know whose kids have iThings... use it as their primary internet device. Don't forget, Mobile Safari also includes every iPad and iPod Touch (do others have wifi browsing?)

.. Aside from Chrome being a joke of a browser, my main issue is that Chrome is based on WebKit. Google piggybacking on Apple's technology hurts innovation. Most Chrome users are unaware they are using Safari, just with less options.

You do realize that Apple piggybacked WebKet from KHTML which was written for KDE on Linux. That is why it is open source in the first place. Because it HAD to be.

I'm well aware of the history of WebKit. KHTML was little used, and Apple went full-force with the innovation to bring it up to speed as not only a viable alternative, but now the most used web engine. It's not dissimilar to OSX. Granted, the majority of the work was undertaken at NeXT. When Apple got running with WebKit they were big on "Open Standards" which they advertised heavily (Darwin, etc).

That's not the case now. Looking at the info page for Mountain Lion, I don't see any mention of "open source." This is precisely why I take issue with Chrome's reliance on Apple.

This last patch of firefox is leading to lots of 1 to 2 second freezes while pages load in tabs. It's driving me nuts. On the other hand, Chrome making settings changes so inaccessible (along with inheriting system proxy settings in windows without a built in way to change) rubs me the wrong way enough that I'll keep using Firefox.

I sure hope FF fixes the delays in loading, though, as I might have to switch over to Chrome anyway if it gets bad enough.

"What is Country-Level Weighting, and Why Do You Do It?The NetMarketShare data is weighted by country. We compare our traffic to the CIA Internet Traffic by Country table, and weight our data accordingly. For example, if our global data shows that Brazil represents 2% of our traffic, and the CIA table shows Brazil to represent 4% of global Internet traffic, we will count each unique visitor from Brazil twice." (from their FAQ)

They also count unique visitors per day, which seems sensible. but this country weighting thing seems completely wrong somehow. First of all , how does the CIA measure this?If it's a matter of gigabits/second, then that data just shows who uses the most bandwidth. If it's unique visitors per day as net marketshare does, then that info is irrelevant since net marketshare already counted that. If they adjust their own counters, based on what CIA says trafic should be, isn't this skewing any results into what CIA says. They could be measuring peoples shoesize and end up with IE in the lead. This just seems unreliable. I'd like to know what their numbers says before the country weight leveling.

The share of IE8 in the IE version breakdown can be largely attributed to WinXP. Microsoft stopped updating IE on XP after IE8.This little tidbit has bit my company on the butt a few times as web apps that worked great with IE9, Chrome, and Firefox had glitches under IE8, and therefore, XP. It was deemed poor customer service to force XP customers to use another browser, so development had to make it work.

That's not the case now. Looking at the info page for Mountain Lion, I don't see any mention of "open source." This is precisely why I take issue with Chrome's reliance on Apple.

Check out the commit logs for WebKit, and you'll see that Apple would suffer about as much from Google dropping WebKit as Google would from Apple.

Also, while KHTML wasn't heavily used, it was already a very capable rendering engine that paid a huge amount of attention to standards compliance (its main issue was that Mozilla/Netscape and IE had a long history of quirky functionality that wasn't standards compliant).

.. Aside from Chrome being a joke of a browser, my main issue is that Chrome is based on WebKit. Google piggybacking on Apple's technology hurts innovation. Most Chrome users are unaware they are using Safari, just with less options.

You do realize that Apple piggybacked WebKet from KHTML which was written for KDE on Linux. That is why it is open source in the first place. Because it HAD to be.

I'm well aware of the history of WebKit. KHTML was little used, and Apple went full-force with the innovation to bring it up to speed as not only a viable alternative, but now the most used web engine. It's not dissimilar to OSX. Granted, the majority of the work was undertaken at NeXT. When Apple got running with WebKit they were big on "Open Standards" which they advertised heavily (Darwin, etc).

That's not the case now. Looking at the info page for Mountain Lion, I don't see any mention of "open source." This is precisely why I take issue with Chrome's reliance on Apple.

I'm not quite sure what you're implying. You do realize Google is a major contributor to WebKit, right? In your opinion, why should Apple be permitted to utilize FOSS (be it in Safari or core Mac OS X software such as XNU) yet not Google?

Yup. I browse maybe 3 pages per week on my Nexus phone. No need - I have a dual-monitor setup at work and home. I do spend some time browsing via mobile apps (like engadget, woot) if I have a spare minutes in a meeting... but rarely use the web browser.

However, many friends I know whose kids have iThings... use it as their primary internet device. Don't forget, Mobile Safari also includes every iPad and iPod Touch (do others have wifi browsing?)

Hmmm, but Net Marketshare says they only count one unique visitor per day, so that shouldn't skew the results that much. odd.

I'm well aware of the history of WebKit. KHTML was little used, and Apple went full-force with the innovation to bring it up to speed as not only a viable alternative, but now the most used web engine. It's not dissimilar to OSX. Granted, the majority of the work was undertaken at NeXT. When Apple got running with WebKit they were big on "Open Standards" which they advertised heavily (Darwin, etc).

That's not the case now. Looking at the info page for Mountain Lion, I don't see any mention of "open source." This is precisely why I take issue with Chrome's reliance on Apple.

They went with KHTML because they were lazy and didn't want to use proprietary software and get screwed like they did by Mircrosoft with IE. What were they gonna use? Opera, Netscape? Mozilla was in the works but not out yet.

Yup. I browse maybe 3 pages per week on my Nexus phone. No need - I have a dual-monitor setup at work and home. I do spend some time browsing via mobile apps (like engadget, woot) if I have a spare minutes in a meeting... but rarely use the web browser.

However, many friends I know whose kids have iThings... use it as their primary internet device. Don't forget, Mobile Safari also includes every iPad and iPod Touch (do others have wifi browsing?)

And I use my Droid 4 as my primary internet device. Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.

My strong suspicion is that most of the difference is due to the fact that people (regardless of platform) do a lot more surfing on tablets than they do on phones, because that's arguably the main thing people do with tablets. And we all know who the king of tablets is.

It's definitely possible that a larger percentage of iPhone users browse than Android phone users, but I wouldn't think the difference would explain more than a fraction of the gap.